Engineer from Agawam recalls day Eagle landed on the moon

The Republican photo by MARK M. MURRAY Ronald C. Augusti of Agawam, holds an autographed photo of the Apollo 11 astronauts, left to right, Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., as he stands next to a portrait of the various missions he worked on as an engineer including the lunar modual, while he was at Hamilton Standard.

By JIM KINNEY
Business writer

AGAWAM - In the 1960s, as a young man with a freshly-minted mechanical engineering degree from Western New England College, Ronald C. Augusti had a job working for a commercial refrigeration company.

That was until he interviewed for a job at Hamilton Standard in Windsor Locks, Conn., and learned of the company's work on the Apollo program - America's quest to visit the moon.

"As soon as I heard 'space', that was the place to be," Augusti, now 69, remembered from his home in Feeding Hills here this week. "It was every engineer's dream. You were working on something that hasn't been done before. You had a goal from the president of the United States."

The Eagle, as the Apollo lunar space module which Augusti helped design for NASA was known, landed 40 years ago Monday, at 4:18 p.m. on July 20, 1969.

Just a few hours later, at 10:56 p.m., Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot in an alien world.

"That's one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind," were Armstrong's words to the world as he set his feet on the moon's surface.

More than half a billion people were watching on television.

"The next day at work, all anyone could talk about was how great it was," Augusti recalled.

He remembers how, on July 24, 1969, a voice came over the Hamilton Standard public address system telling staff that the spacecraft had splashed down, safely returning to Earth, and been recovered by the Navy. Astronauts Armstrong, Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins were home.

"It was jubilation," Augusti said.

Remembering Apollo 11: Local engineer's part in history

Hamilton Standard's links to America's space exploration program were many. Its engineers built the environmental control and life support systems, oxygen supply and carbon dioxide removal equipment - "All the things that the astronauts would need to survive on the moon and in the Apollo," he said.

Another Hamilton Standard team built the life-sustaining backpacks worn by Aldrin and Armstrong.

Today known as Hamilton Sundstrand, the company, a division of United Technologies, still makes equipment for the international space station and the space shuttles, both programs which Augusti has also worked on. The company also makes the NASA space suits of today.

But, in 1963, when he started at Hamilton, Augusti said no one had any expertise in space flight. "We took aircraft technology and brought it up to space quality," he said.

And, they designed everything without computers. "I still have my slide rule," Augusti said.

"That set the whole program back a year or more," Augusti said. "We had to go back and certify all the materials to make sure they weren't combustible."

Two years later, for Apollo 11 and its astronauts, all systems were go.

Alan Rifkin, of South Hadley, watched Armstrong take those historic steps from a recreation room at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.

Within a year or so, Rifkin was working as a student with astronauts on a research project that Clarkson was doing for NASA. In total, 10 Apollo astronauts would visit the moon in the next three years.

The Apollo astronauts saw odd shaped flashes of light during their space travels, the result of radiation hitting the water in the astronauts' eyes. The project involved taking the astronauts to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and trying to replicate the phenomena.

Rifkin's job was to stack the lead bricks that protected the astronauts from the radiation.

"We were engineers. We were techno geeks," said Rifkin, now secretary of the Northeast Region of Astronomic League and president of the Springfield Telescope and Reflector Society or STARS. "We ate that stuff up."

In those days, Rifkin thought he'd have been able to vacation on the moon by 1989.

"In those days we were so optimistic," he said. "You know, the Jetsons and rocket cars. They don't even put the shuttle launches on TV anymore."

Richard H. Sanderson, curator of physical science at the Springfield Science Museum, remembers people lined up to the street when a moon rock - Armstrong and Aldrin scooped up 46 pounds worth of lunar rocks - went on display at the museum in the early 1970s.